The importance of physical education in the formation of colonial cadres, prominent in the French and, to an even greater degree, in the British cases, was also echoed, albeit more feebly, in Portugal.117 The Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (Lisbon Geographic Society) was one of the first Portuguese institutions to organize, in 1930, a physical education course aimed specifically at colonial cadres.
A Portuguese Body
The Estado Novo’s model of physical education was promoted as a push toward the “regeneration of the race.” This “race,” however, a national race framed by a sovereign state, did not include the African population, whose sports habits were considered to be “natural” and “pre-modern.” In the metropole the Estado Novo intervened in the sports practice of students and workers,118 and in 1940 it founded a training center similar to the civil and military specialized schools that had been established in several European countries119—the Instituto Nacional de Educação Física (INEF, National Institute of Physical Education)—and created an official structure that coordinated and supervised all sports activities organized outside state control: the Direcção Geral de Educação Física, Desportos e Saúde Escolar (DGEFDSE, General Office of Physical Education, Sports, and Scholastic Health). Control over sports associations was one dimension of a wider plan that sought to regulate the associative movement in Portugal.120 Trained in foreign schools, the men who established the theoretical and practical bases of the Portuguese model of physical education were military officers, such as the notable Celestino Marques Pereira and António Leal de Oliveira.121
During the Estado Novo regime, football matches were among the few mass public demonstrations taking place in Portugal. The national football league was created in 1934 and definitively institutionalized in 1938. Football was seen as an inadequate exercise by the state. In 1932, a decree was issued, within the Ministério da Instrução (Ministry of Instruction), the Direcção dos Serviços de Educação Física (Head Office of Physical Education Services), which considered sports games as the “antithesis of all education” and a vehicle to “physical deformation” and “moral perversion.” The high-school physical education regulation, approved in 1932, forbade “Anglo-Saxon sports and athletic games, and all competitions in general, namely football matches, as their educational value was nil and their dangers obvious.”122 Furthermore, football’s professionalizing tendency, which stimulated processes of social mobility, challenged an official corporative framework that was based on the principle that class relations should remain stable.123 The success of players from a working-class background, in an activity with a powerful media impact, sent the “wrong” message about the existing social organization.124
The official ideology of the body was also an ideology of the place occupied by gesture within everyday social life, which was clear from the critical commentaries, emblematic of this model of physical education, on the modern city and the habits that thrived in it. Physical education, a scientific and rational discipline, contributed to the return of “bodily naturalness” and regulated the individual’s adjustment to his new social milieu.125 This science measured and systematized movement on the basis of knowledge about mechanical and physiological principles. But as movements were triggered by emotions, physical exercises should be “executed in line with established norms and intentions . . . in harmony with other means of moral and intellectual education.”126 The emotions that trigger movement, according to Leal de Oliveira, should be the result of the “existence of morality, religion, education, and civilization.”127 This Portuguese model of physical exercise was sustained by moral principles that synthesized Christian thought, Latin historical heritage, and modern corporative ideas.128
The Portuguese researchers in physical education wanted to develop a strategy that could sustain the application of a state model.129 If in a premodern context this physical activity, although instinctive, was part of a natural order, in the artificial environment of an industrialized city, the socializing framework underpinning these impulses was artificial. Modern physical education needed to control such “inherited and involuntary motor techniques,” and “innate reflex movements.”130 For this rationalization process to be effective, body movements would have to be predetermined, in view of the “intellectual and perhaps moral meaning of a conscious goal.”131 For Leal de Oliveira, the concept of ideomotor stood for predetermined movements: “Movements springing directly from an idea are called ideomotor movements, an idea that is integrated within an instinctive tendency that, in turn, mobilizes and articulates reflex actions.”132 Every deliberate movement was ideomotor. Its execution was “conditioned by a power or personal will, which provides reflexive consciousness along with the faculty to execute the movement or not, and in a specific way.”133 Bodies whose movements did not correspond to a predetermined impulse were considered potentially harmful: “noneducated impulses,” responsible for heterodox and impure gestures, should be eliminated.134
The movements deemed adequate for preparing the bodies of the Portuguese were those of the Swedish gymnastics method.135 Segmented movements were fundamental (suspension, support, balancing, walking, running, rising, and transporting movements, as well as throwing and jumping). Cadenced movements, quite common in gymnastics, “facilitated collective work because rhythm represented an order, a natural discipline conducive to the harmony and concordance of partial efforts and to their union.”136 The idea of cadenced rhythm, of ordering, was common to numerous educational practices during the Estado Novo, namely those that involved the use of music.137 Natural exercises such as “walking, running, climbing, balancing, throwing, rising, carrying, swimming” were, by definition, useful and correct, “when executed in a manner that preceded any changes brought about by civilization.”138 Symmetry was the basic feature of the exercises prescribed by this gymnastics method. On the contrary, according to Leal de Oliveira, asymmetrical exercises could hardly become a habit because they “require the dissociation of symmetrical coordination fixed by habit. Human attention has to divide itself between the two homologous parts of the body, through which corresponding impulses and ideas immediately follow in the mind.”139 In his view, the dissociation of attention, the possibility of choice and the confusion between ideas were perverse qualities and led to an ill-defined body. Leal de Oliveira pointed out that a movement’s aesthetics rested on its usefulness, adding that “rectilinear movements,” typical of gymnastics, “express calm and determination,” whereas “curvilinear movements,” present, for instance, in sports such as football, reflected “indecisiveness.”140
The careful tailoring of each movement to the age and sex of the participant was one of the basic principles of the Ling method. The creation of the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Feminine Portuguese Youth), in 1937, institutionalized a sexual separation and distinction between the types of exercises appropriate for each sex.141 Thanks to the ability to categorize students according to a specific biotype, the kinds of movements more appropriate for each individual would be determined, thereby improving physical performances, correcting the bodies’ postures, preventing illnesses, and guiding youths in their professional life.142 A specific training space was necessary for the proper teaching of this orthodoxy of movement. The modern gymnasium, which since the late nineteenth century had gradually become more common in Europe, represented the space where the relationship between teacher and student could be regulated through a set of norms and hierarchies. It was a closed domain, measured and organized according to the intersection of straight lines. By taking individuals out of their social environment, this domain became a laboratory of bodies and ways of being and acting,